


Time crawls forward

by Isangma



Category: Fire Emblem Series, Fire Emblem Tellius, Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn, Fire Emblem: Soen no Kiseki/Akatsuki no Megami | Fire Emblem Path of Radiance/Radiant Dawn
Genre: Angst, Early grief, F/M, Growing Old, Nagamas, Nagamas fill, Old Age, Post-Game, Prompt Fill, Winter Nagamas 2014, the passage of time
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-27
Updated: 2015-01-27
Packaged: 2018-03-09 06:01:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,642
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3238994
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Isangma/pseuds/Isangma
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Look at your hands. They’re so big… They were so small when we met." She has come to regret these words.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Time crawls forward

**Author's Note:**

  * For [flarewerking](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=flarewerking).



> My Nagamas fill is so late, ugh. I'm so sorry, flarewerking! I hope you find this acceptable. I also wish I'd been able to fill the other ones you gave, but alas, not enough time.
> 
> Prompt: "FE10, Micaiah/Sothe. Before she has even the merest wrinkle, he is withered and gray, with none of his old grace or strength. Resentment, early mourning."

Sothe’s hands invariably became a marker for the passage of time without Micaiah wanting them to.

They’d become bony, freckled things, more skin stretched taut than flesh, their grip weakened over the passing years.

He’d gone from holding onto her firmly when he was in his prime to weakly grasping, a hold easily broken if she simply moved away from it.

Those hands she had once held cherishingly during the Daien war and the first few decades of her reign she now had to force herself not to take gingerly, since for all that he had slowed reflexes, Sothe hadn’t gone blind.

He stopped holding her hand shortly after his seventieth birthday, and the relief she felt at that ate away inside her every day.

**

Once, Micaiah had held out her hand to a small, frail alley cat of a boy who was shaking even as he decided to trust her. Nowadays, she can barely make herself hold on to the thin, trembling form of the old man the boy has grown up into.

She looks at herself in the mirror and sees no change in her appearance, whereas she can’t help but startle every time she catches sight of Sothe, tanned, once-soft skin covered in leathery wrinkles and scars he’s gained in battle, thick, rich green hair faded to wispy grey limp strands, bright eyes grown dull and watery. Where he used to hold himself straight and proud, he’s now crooked and bent from age and exhaustion. He had muscles he still kept, but they’re not as they used to be, the firmness having lost some of its consistency from youth, his reaction time slowed considerably, his grace and ease having become a choppy, awkward thing in comparison.

The Sothe from the rebellion is a memory of time passed, and soon, even this washed out old man will disappear from her life and lay to rest as all living things must. In the end, the time she had with Sothe was nothing more than memories from the start.

**

_“I thought I might travel to a far-off place after all of this was over. But I won’t. I’ll go back to Daein. No matter what happens, I’ll have Sothe by my side. I have nothing to fear as long as he’s with me.”_

She had said these words to Ike, so certain and full of confidence, and now Micaiah sees this statement for the bravado it was. She had promised herself things could only get better with time now that there was peace, now that she had stopped running away from Sothe, but in the end, she’d sealed herself in a trap she couldn’t escape.

Time was a trap that sank its toothless mouth into you from the get-go and nothing would shake it off of you, nor could it. There was no release from its maws.

She presses her lips into a thin line as she watches Sothe walk across the training yard from the window she sits at, staring at the targets longingly, fingering his knife he still carries upon his belt, and has to turn away and return to the documents she’s working on as queen of Daien.

She’d signed herself up to more responsibility than she felt comfortable with while clinging to the false idea she’d have someone by her side forever. What a foolish dream.

**

There are days she wishes Sothe were already dead, that she were free to find a new partner among the Branded in Stefan’s kingdom. ( _She’d been there once, to visit, a great palace in the desert built within ruins and passages in the ground, teeming with Branded of all ages that would linger upon Tellius’s lands for centuries to come, a family she could have had, but the clenching of Sothe’s fists and his refusal to meet her gaze the entire time they visited prevented her from voicing her desire to live there. She sent another as ambassador between their kingdoms and hasn’t left the country since, and the relief in Sothe’s figure was palpable, but short lived. And he aged, and his body changed, and she found herself no longer reaching out for strong, supple, calloused hands that he no longer had, since the ones he now had made her stiff and awkward when they roamed over her body haltingly, and soon their bed that had seemed luxuriantly too large before was now too small a distance between them at night._ )

The fear of loneliness as she watches the Beorc she knew die one by one, leaving her behind to watch the next generation grow and die, one by one, until the end of her days, makes her understand Lehran’s grief all the more poignantly.

With Sothe alive, she can’t leave. She doesn’t want to leave. They’ve seen and lived through so much together, he at her side, that the idea of leaving before he breathes his last has her feeling ill and nauseous, her throat constricting at the thought.

Yet he lives, and she counts the days, eyes the position of the sun, stares at the calendar more often than she did in his youth, and bitterness seeps into her bones, and their suppers together are tense and quiet and they barely make eye contact most of these days. They hardly speak when they hit these moods ( _grown so frequent and tangible, a presence of ill temperament slipping within their marriage_ ), ignore the other as much as possible without raising any suspicions since they wish to avoid the questions that will invariably be raised.

Bile rises up her throat whenever she sees the younger knights eyeing her and Sothe together, the whispers of him being old enough to be her grandfather if she were a Beorc making her twitch while Sothe’s hands ball into fists before suddenly going lax since he’s too tired to argue with such comments anymore.

They’re both exhausted of facing the sanction of those who weren’t there with them to fight the war. She can’t bother to explain for the nth time that she’s older than Sothe by several years and that she’s older than her sister, the aging empress of Begnion.

She still looks to be in her twenties, the spring of her youth colouring her cheeks and complexion, whereas Sothe’s long gone into his winter and continues to advance into it, and there won’t be a second spring for him.

Micaiah feels old and doesn’t look it. She doesn’t want to think about how Sothe feels.

**

Micaiah can see in the way Sothe avoids her gaze while they speak that he can’t bear the sight of birthright.

When he gets easily frustrated at his inability to throw his dagger as straight and as easily as he once could, when he loses his breath much earlier than the younger recruits he once trained ( _he was told to retire and let someone younger take over and the sting of that moment is poison still flowing in his veins, searing hot and suffocating_ ), the small signs proving his strength has since depleted despite the fact he’s in good shape for his age ( _his age, ha, he’s lived longer than his life expectancy and is younger than his near-eternally youthful wife and yet he’s the one hearing the constant mentions of his age, the time he’s lived on this Earth, the little he has left upon it_ ), it all builds up to him weeping quietly in a removed alcove he thinks she can’t find, to punch at a wall that bruises his hands and nearly breaks his bones, they’ve become so fragile as to nearly remind one of a Heron.

He mumbled in his sleep, once, that she not leave him behind. That she not abandon him a second time. She promised him she wouldn’t.

“Micaiah, I can’t walk as fast anymore… Slow down and let me catch up, please…”

She had no answer for his mumbled plea. He wasn’t conscious to hear one anyway.

**

Sothe’s the one leaving her behind. Micaiah’s time isn’t for a long while yet, and his is nearly upon them. The knowledge of separation being imminent claws away at her insides and she can’t breathe sometimes, squeezes her eyes shut, leans against a wall and refuses to make a sound, bites her lip until she bleeds to prevent tears from running down her face and dripping to the floor, staining the world with her grief.

He’s still alive; he hasn’t left her, yet.

**

Sleep proves fleeting when he lies at her side, his breathing halting and erratic.

Each time he stops for more than four seconds, her heart speeds up and she holds her breath, counts the seconds ( _let it be tonight if it must be at night, let him feel no pain and slip away easily, his life has been hard, he’s earned it, let it be tonight if it won’t be tomorrow and wasn’t yesterday_ ) that pass before he stutters an inhalation, snorts, returns to snoring a little too loud, but it’s a regular sound, and she holds onto her own breath a few moments longer before slowly letting it escape, quietly, quietly, and digs her fingers into her chest where her heart aches, because he’s _still alive_ , and he’ll be there for her tomorrow.

Let him live to see tomorrow, and she’ll tell him she loves him in the morning, and she’ll hold him and refuse to let go since he won’t abandon her and she won’t let him feel like she’ll do so to him a second time.

Venom stings at her eyes and she closes them tight, she won’t let herself cry since her red eyes will remind her of his and they’re too far apart now to allow such similarities to fall between them.

There’ll be deep, angry gouges on her skin tomorrow that Sothe won’t see.


End file.
